With 5e here, what will 4e be remembered for?

[Ruin Explorer]

I first heard of the Holy Trinity in EQ. It was tank, healer and support.

Specifically, the Holy Trinity was Warrior, Cleric and Shaman. Out of a six-man group, those were they ultimate three classes with which to start. The warrior and cleric for obvious reasons, and the shaman for hastes and slows. Then, the other three roles could be all DPS, or you could add a bard or ranger for pulling or an enchanter for CC on huge groups.

That was the original Holy Trinity. It wasn't meant to be the only roles in the game so much as the basis of the ultimate or most optimal groups.

If it were me, I'd remove "DPS" as part of the Trinity and put support back in its rightful place. Then, I'd make damage purely a function of fulfilling your main role in combat.

Indeed, but that's the second Holy Trinity in EQ. The first was Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter (Tank, Healer, CC).

 

[Neonchameleon]

Failing to attract those new players in signifigant numbers and losing your old fans is a bit of an own goal though.

Given that 3.5 haemoherraged fans and 4e seemed to stop the rot this is questionable. If we look at Google Trends in the four years starting six months after the release of D&D 3.5 more than half the D&D searches dropped off. In the five years starting six months after the release of 4e, the drop off was around 25%.

I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.

Given that D&D is and has always been a hacked tabletop wargame right the way back to the brown box, I'm not sure what point this is meant to raise. Other than that it's a more modern wargame.

I'm not sure any other company was as well-positioned as Paizo to fill the market void.

Indeed.

Not true. In previous editions to 3E there wasn’t a need for miniatures or any other visual/tactile representation.

They just measured distances in inches. And wanted exact measurements.

In 3e the ‘attacks of opportunity’ rules, and the like, became more strident, but again this was controversial at the time, and many groups ignored them (indeed considering the wide variety of d20 products that didn’t use miniatures - it’s quite evident).

The 3.5 rules on the other hand explicitly require a grid. A pattern that was followed by 4E.

I knew I was getting one wrong! The roles reflect the ablative/attrition nature of most "tough" combat in MMOs.

Tank/DPS/Support? What does that remind me of? Ah, yes. Fighter/Wizard (as battlefield artillery)/Cleric. The three classes in the Brown Box. 2E is very explicit about having roles - with there being four. These were not MMO things. They were things MMOs borrowed from D&D.

 

[TrippyHippy]

They just measured distances in inches. And wanted exact measurements.

I’m not sure what you are trying to argue here (or why!). Prior to 3E there was no requirement to use miniatures - as stated before.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sorry to pick on a post that was otherwise full of truth, but:

Given that 3.5 haemoherraged fans and 4e seemed to stop the rot this is questionable. If we look at Google Trends in the four years starting six months after the release of D&D 3.5 more than half the D&D searches dropped off. In the five years starting six months after the release of 4e, the drop off was around 25%.

Hold on. Aren't D&D searches are going to go up after the announcement of Next? I sense a confounding factor in your comparison.

Y'know, looking at the data, I see no meaningful correlation with editions, announced or released, and am seeing spikes around news articles. I don't think you're measuring ongoing interest in D&D by D&Ders, here, but curiosity about D&D among 'outsiders' who see it mentioned in the news but don't know what it is, so google it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I’m not what you are trying to argue here (or why!). Prior to 3E there was no requirement to use miniatures - as stated before.

There was no /requirement/ to use minis in any ed. The assumption - explicit or implicit - that you'd use miniatures was in every ed though, from 0D&D, which called itself a miniatures wargame, to AD&D, which, in the wargame tradition, used inches for movement, ranges & areas, to 3e with it's grid templates and horizontal movement rules, to 4e with it's square fireballs.

5e is the first edition to make a point of pretending that you're not supposed to use miniatures - even though it has no rules to facilitate "TotM" (the way 13A does, for just one instance of many), and still gives movement, range, and area in feet, rounded to 5' and 10' increments, just like 'gird-dependent' 3e.

 

[TrippyHippy]

There was no /requirement/ to use minis in any ed. The assumption - explicit or implicit - that you'd use miniatures was in every ed though, from 0D&D, which called itself a miniatures wargame, to AD&D, which, in the wargame tradition, used inches for movement, ranges & areas, to 3e with it's grid templates and horizontal movement rules, to 4e with it's square fireballs.

5e is the first edition to make a point of pretending that you're not supposed to use miniatures - even though it has no rules to facilitate "TotM" (the way 13A does, for just one instance of many), and still gives movement, range, and area in feet, rounded to 5' and 10' increments, just like 'gird-dependent' 3e.

No - it’s not true. There was some suggestions of using miniatures, but nothing rules wise that had you referring to miniature use before third edition with the possible exception of the very first edition in 1974, which still had the assumption of itself being a war-game of sorts. If you picked up a Basic D&D set (or advanced D&D to follow) in the 1980s, as I did, you generally didn’t play with miniatures as a norm (and no miniatures or grid was provided!) and it made no difference to the rules of the game, whatsoever.

Some gamers would bring in some cool painted miniatures to represent PCs or monsters occasionally, and we’d all go ‘ooh’ as they were plonked in the middle of the table, but they’d never be used in any way in terms of measuring ranges or the like. We used no grids at all, and the scribbled maps the DM would show us on scraps of paper, sometimes, would usually be too small for the miniatures to fit on, let alone move them around*. If you wanted to formally use them in a tactical situation, you’d play Warhammer instead.

Oh, and 5E does have rules to simulate ‘Theatre of the Mind’ - as written, all of them are.

* Actually, what I recall is that the DM didn’t do maps at all, and one of the players actually had to draw a map of the dungeon as we explored it in order to not get lost!

 

[Tony Vargas]

No - it’s not true. There was some suggestions of using miniatures, but nothing rules wise that had you referring to miniature use before third edition with the possible exception of the very first edition in 1974, which still had the assumption of itself being a war-game of sorts. If you played without miniatures it made no difference to the rules of the game whatsoever (and none were provided!).

It's true you can run any game 'TotM' if you really want to - I've done it with games more 'grid' (actually hex) dependent than any ed of D&D. You don't have to change the rules to do it, you're just keeping track of relative movement, positioning, range and area in your head.

Some games have specific rules to facilitate that. 13th Age is an example (though it /also/ has minis rules, IIRC). There are others. None of them are editions of D&D, though. When a game gives you movement, ranges, areas, and the like in feet (like 3e or 5e) or in a scale - like inches (0D&D, AD&D) or squares (4e) - it's giving you tools to run with the game on a surface using miniatures (or tokens or what-ever). That surface may be a sheet of paper with X's and O's on it, or it may be a bare tabletop, newfangled (invented in the 80s!) battlemat, or sandtable or whatever, but the expectation of a game using that level of precision is that you will use that level of precision, somehow.

TotM /can/ do that, but it's not idea for it. Ironically, games that use feet or inches are a just little harder to run TotM than those that use less granular scales, like squares or hexes.

Games that facilitate 'TotM' handle range, positioning, movement & area in a less precise, more relative way. So you might have 'zones' or 'areas' and characters can go from one zone to another by moving, and attacks with range span so many 'areas.' Or relative position could be reduced to a few adjectives - adjacent, close, far. These games are specifically designed to be played without a surface and work well in that mode. When used with a surface and minis, such rules are a little less appealing, because it becomes obvious you can move your miniature with more freedom and position it more precisely than the rules allow, and they go from feeling 'lite' to feeling 'restrictive.'

I expect 5e to come up with some sort of decent TotM-fascilitating rules, eventually, once it's promised modularity appears. Until then, it's no more or less a miniatures game than prior eds.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I expect 5e to come up with some sort of decent TotM-fascilitating rules, eventually, once it's promised modularity appears. Until then, it's no more or less a miniatures game than prior eds.

It’s certainly less of a miniatures game than 4E, and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous.

Moreover, there seems to be disconnect over what ’Theatre of the Mind’ actually is, and it’s one of the great myths that the ‘Indie’ movement perpetuated in the last decade. You don’t need any extra rules to facilitate theatre of the mind - people already naturally have an imagination. You just need to create the framework to allow players to engage in the creative imagination of a shared narrative. That’s precisely what you are given with 5th Edition D&D.

The more rules you add, particularly if they pertain to distracting things like grid movement and tactical miniatures play, means the less time you’re players can actually engage with their own ‘theatre of the mind’.

 

[Umbran]

Given that 3.5 haemoherraged fans and 4e seemed to stop the rot this is questionable. If we look at Google Trends in the four years starting six months after the release of D&D 3.5 more than half the D&D searches dropped off. In the five years starting six months after the release of 4e, the drop off was around 25%.

To steal an adage from Richard Feynman - The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Yes, that's what was happening with Google searches.

The question, of course, is why? You rather blithely imply that these numbers reflect the rate at which people were outright leaving the game, and, by extension, the drop off was due to some characteristic(s) of the games in question.

Isn't that just a big hairy guess, though? How do you defend that as anything other than having data say what you want it to say?

I mean, how do you know it is of people leaving? Why couldn't it just as easily be read as saying that searches dropped off because people had gotten caught up on each new edition's changes, and simply didn't *need* to search any more? It would then make sense that searches for 3.5e would drop off much faster, because it was less of a departure from the previous ruleset, and thus easier to catch up on. They're still playing, they just didn't need the web to tell them as much.

Or, more specifically, they don't need *Google* to tell them as much - if they find sources they bookmark, they no longer need Google. So, maybe 3.5e had more *bookmarkable* sources that folks could reliably return to for information, leading to a faster drop-off of searches? Maybe it is about the websites, not about the games themselves.

Or, we could take this as a critique upon the games - in general, 4e requires more external input for people to understand than 3.5e does!

Or, we could note that 4e was released in 2008. Completely unrelated to the release, the years following it were economically disastrous for many people - in tough times, folks may tend turn to inexpensive forms of entertainment - maybe there were more 4e searches because cruising the internet for stuff about RPGs is a heck of a lot cheaper than most other ways to spend your time and keep your mind engaged, and 4e had the "benefit" of being the new kid on the block at the time.

Any of those, of course, would be just more big hairy guesses. All are consistent with the data, but only our *feelings*, not data, tell us one is more probably true than the other.

The point being that plausible story doesn't equal truth.

 

[Hussar]

No - it’s not true. There was some suggestions of using miniatures, but nothing rules wise that had you referring to miniature use before third edition with the possible exception of the very first edition in 1974, which still had the assumption of itself being a war-game of sorts. If you picked up a Basic D&D set (or advanced D&D to follow) in the 1980s, as I did, you generally didn’t play with miniatures as a norm (and no miniatures or grid was provided!) and it made no difference to the rules of the game, whatsoever.

/snip

Huh. I must have imagined those flanking diagrams in AdnD.

How did you determine shield effectiveness if you were so vague about positioning? Never mind things like space requirements in order to use certain weapons.

I think it's true that lots of people ignored the rules for minis in AdnD. But the rules were there.